What's it all about?

Internet old-timers will surely remember the excitement that sprouted around when Real announced the release of their "streaming audio player''. For the first time, the promises of a real multimedia immersion seemed to have a chance to win against the everlasting scarcity of bandwidth- and even if the first Real Player releases made your old LPs sound like high quality CDs, the road was paved.

Then came mp3. The incredible diffusion that this technology achieved can be seen in the number of domains with the word "mp3'' well embedded in it- how many "wav.com'' domains have you seen around? (Actually, wav.com is registered by mp3.com hostmaster... what a coincidence).

By itself, MP3 ("MPEG-1 Audio Layer III", to be precise) is just an audio codec developed by the MPEG group, whose main characteristic is the high level of compression it can achieve. Mind you, we are talking about "lossy'' compression here, i.e., once you compress an audio track into an MP3 file, you can't totally reverse the effects and bring it back to the original audio file. MP3 "encoding'' can be done through any software which implements the MP3 codec specifications; once you have your .mp3 files, you can play them with a software which "decodes'' them into a format understandable by your PC (or car radio, or walkman, or whatever).

You may have noticed that the actions performed by these programs, "encoding" and "decoding", are what the term "codec" actually stands for: a "codec" is just a way to "encode" and "decode" something. One of the reasons MP3 got so popular for home users is that MP3 encoders are readily available, something which is not true for Real Audio and other audio formats.

The diffusion of the MP3 format is under our eyes, everywhere. You can store your whole CD collection in a small hard disk. You can listen to music through the Internet (MP3, although not specifically thought for streaming through the net, can and actually is used to this extent, although the results sometimes reflect that this is simply an "ad hoc'' solution). You can even- horror of horrors- exchange MP3 files with other people: does the word "Napster'' ring a bell?

So, it would seem that, at least as regards audio, the Internet has fulfilled its promises. Right? Wrong. All legal battles about copyright and the liceity of sharing music notwithstanding, the MP3 "format'' doesn't come for free, neither in the beer nor in the speech sense. MPEG-1 Audio Layer III is a patented technology, and everytime you use it, either for encoding your old LP collection or for listening to your preferred tune, as well as for setting up your own Internet radio station, you are supposed to pay big bucks to Fraunhofer institute, which holds the patent for the aforementioned audio codec. Are you starting to see the whole picture in a different light now? Given that the existing (Real Audio) and the forthcoming (AAC, TwinVQ, PAC) alternatives aren't free either, the existence of the Ogg Vorbis project is a refreshing breath of air.

Quoting extensively from the Ogg Project web site, we discover that:

"OggSquish is a group of several related multimedia and signal processing projects; two are currently in active development for planned release. Our goal is to protect essential tenets of Internet multimedia from corporate hostage-taking; Open Source is the net's greatest tool to keep everyone honest.

OggSquish is about research, source code and education. Along with our code, we offer the development community detailed documentation of our research and the resulting software. Our current development focuses on the Vorbis audio codec (now nearing initial release). Research also includes work on future video and lossless audio coding.

Currently, Ogg Vorbis is our primary effort: Ogg Vorbis is a fully Open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC."

So, will Ogg Vorbis really live up to its promises? I talked a bit with Monty, one of the core developers of the Ogg Vorbis project, to try to understand what's going on, what the future holds for Ogg, how we can help, and various other nifty things, all exclusively for you BinaryFreedom readers!

Andrea: So, the first and foremost question: why OggSquish? In other words, what were the feelings which motivated you and your fellow hackers to start such a project?

Monty: Originally, OggSquish was nothing more than coding for the pure enjoyment of it. I wanted to use my new, super-spiffy 486-DX50 running Linux for music work, and even its incredibly huge (at the time) 1GB hard drive didn't allow for storing much audio. OggSquish started as some quick compression code as part of this larger music software project.

Andrea: When did the project start?

Monty: The first compression code that would actually get released to the world started in early 1994, but I'd been dabbling since 1993.

Andrea: Why did you start with the OggVorbis project instead of, say, the video codec which appears nevertheless to be amongst your projects? Was it for technical, economical or "marketing" reasons (i.e., to take advantage of the incredible appeal which mp3s have right now)?

Monty: The previous Ogg generation, Stormbringer, was a "meta-codec", a language and virtual machine for writing other codecs. It turns out very few people at the time were interested; they didn't want meta-codecs, they wanted the codecs themselves. A particularly abysmal demo of Stormbringer at Apple finally drove that point home (in addition to the fact that Apple was uninterested in Stormbringer, which needed more work to be practically useful, our demo laptop decided to overheat and break down in the middle of our pitch to the Quicktime group). That took our sense of direction away for a while; for most of 1998, no one worked on anything related to Ogg.

Then in the fall, Fraunhofer decided to start cracking down on free encoder implementations of mp3. That worried me. It also seemed like things were only likely to get worse; the trend was clearly for companies to start "cashing in" on the Net any way possible, often involving the basic technology itself, and it looked like digital audio would be no different. In 1998 this sense of foreboding was mostly a vague suspicion, but the trend strengthened and clarified over time. That gave me a clear direction to begin Vorbis; I knew what the world was going to need in a codec and soon.

Andrea: How many persons are currently contributing to the OggVorbis project, both on a stable and on an occasional basis?

Monty: The core team is about three full time people (it varies) and about ten regular contributors.

Andrea: Could you talk a bit about their background, motivations, and roles inside the OggVorbis project?

Monty: The majority of our volunteers are other programmers who work in the digital audio field and believe in open source. I work almost exclusively on the core engine that powers the encoder and decoder, Jack Moffitt is the build maintainer and release engineer (in addition to his duties as the lead of the Icecast project), Michael Smith is the person I delegate most of the coding minutae outside of the core engine. Other people work in specifications/documentation (Ralph Giles, Rob Kaye, Kim Hagen, Tory McLearn), tools (Kenneth Arnold, Chad Armstrong), porting (Chris Hanson, Timothy Wood, lots of others), optimization (Segher Boessenkool and others), basic research (Eric Kruus, Robert Voigt, Greg Maxwell), or attracting attention and keeping the paperwork end of xiph.org screwed on straight (Brian Zisk, Patrick Mahoney, Mike Person).

Those description boundaries aren't always clearly drawn. And I probably left out a bunch of names that belong on the list.

Andrea: Is the project currently backed up, in financial terms, by some private entity?

Monty: Xiph.org's work on Ogg and Vorbis was funded by the Green Witch Internet Radio, which was then bought by CMGI/iCast. iCast is closing down now, and neither iCast nor CMGI funds the project any longer. We've not burned any bridges with CMGI and are parting on good terms for now.

Now we're getting a little more focused on our own internal structure and funding strategy as well as searching for new backers. The beginnings of the search are going well; Ogg is an easy project to sell. For one, we actually produce something and although we're not a profit-driven model, we stand to save digital music firms a great deal of money starting almost immediately (of course, other companies that want to build a profit-driven enterprise on Ogg Vorbis technology are welcomed and encouraged to do so).''

Andrea: How strong do you feel was the community reaction to the OggVorbis project? Are you currently experiencing a considerable amount of participation to the project, either in terms of beta testings, help with documentation, web design, or code?

Monty: Community reaction has been strong both in the developer/user community, admittedly predominantly the open source side of this community, and especially in the online music industry itself. The industry reaction isn't surprising; we stand to save almost every company money at the same time we level the playing field with a standard, freely usable technology. Any company that isn't trying to throw their own proprietary format into the mix is happy to see this.

Andrea: What were your foremost technical objectives when you started designing the OggVorbis codec format? Do you feel like you are fulfilling them?

Monty: I wanted to improve on what was currently out there, and that target has moved alot since 1993. We clearly better mp3, and we're in the big leagues with the best proprietary formats the Big Players can muster, and we wanted to keep it all opened up. I'm personally sick of intellectual property, patents especially, being used as nothing more than dirty corporate weaponry (artist and consumer be damned).''

Andrea: What's the current status of the OggVorbis project?

Monty: We released 1.0 beta 3 the first week of November.

Andrea: When do you plan to put out a "public release", and what will be your criteria to judge whether a release should "go public"?

Monty: The betas are public releases and stable code. They're currently labelled 'beta' because we've not finished implementing the full Vorbis spec. Betas are also useful to evaluate the practical maturity of the code. We regard a "beta" to be code that, to our knowledge, is production-ready. The beta trial is a means of verifying it.

Beta 4, our first 1.0- final release candidate, should be ready end of year (2000). The 1.0- final release is scheduled for January 10th, 2001. Of course, the final say on the release date will be whether or not the code is ready.

Andrea: What will be your next moves, once the OggVorbis project reaches a mature enough status? Do you plan to move on to the video codec?

Monty: Resources allowing, yes; we plan to continue our very beginnings of a video codec (Tarkin) as well as update and reissue Ogg's lossless audio codec named Squish. OggVorbis development doesn't end at 1.0 either.

Andrea: Speaking from a strictly "business" perspective, multimedia streaming is one of the most appetible markets nowadays. Current solutions on the server side are almost all proprietary, with the notable exception of Icecast and Darwin Streaming Server. What's the current level of interoperability of OggVorbis with streaming servers technologies, and with free (as in free speech) ones such as Icecast?

Monty: We already have a version of Icecast that streams Vorbis, although this code isn't ready for release yet; it is currenly mostly a proof of concept.

A few people are keeping Vorbis up to date with respect to MacOS X and Darwin, but I can't give a definitive word what's happening with respect to Darwin Streaming Server.

Do yourself a favour...

and do give a try to Ogg Vorbis. The site gives you all the information and software you need to begin vorbizing your CD collections. You could be surprised to realize the quality that Monty and his team has managed to achieve with this codec. If you want to help them increase your freedom, you don't need to know how to program and have a strong background in digital audio: subscribe to the lists, beta test their releases, refine the website, write (and translate) documentation.